Colourful butterflies and floral vines with black linework wrap across a person's hip and upper thigh, with green, pink and orange fills.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterflies and flowering vines on a hip and thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

Several butterflies in green, pink and orange sit among thin black swirling vines and small flowers that run from the hip down the outer thigh. The linework is dark and fine, with the butterfly wings filled in with bright colour and shaded detail. The design follows the curve of the body, with the vine trailing down toward the knee and the torso and a black top visible at the top of the frame.

Botanical Thigh Butterfly Flower Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The butterflies came up the rock every autumn, the week after the equinox gales had blown themselves out. Ada said they followed the vine, though the vine had been her idea and not theirs. She planted it the spring I took the post at Skerrow Head, a green cutting from the churchyard wall in the village, and it climbed the cottage steps and then the tower's iron rail as if it had somewhere to be.

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By the third year the vine had reached the lamp room windows, with small orange flowers opening between the glass and the brass. The butterflies came in ones and twos, green-winged and pink-tipped, and settled on the rail to warm in the first sun. I kept the log as I always had: wind north-west, visibility good, two vessels passing west. Nothing about the butterflies went in the log. Ada said that was a mistake.

The winter she took ill, the lamp needed trimming every night and my knees would not manage the stairs twice. I found myself talking to the vine while I worked, the way she talked to her plants. One morning in November there were six butterflies on the rail, pink and green and gold, and none of them lifted when I opened the door.

I wrote them in the log that day, under the weather. Then I carried a cutting down to the cottage and set it in the window where she could see it from the bed. She counted the butterflies twice, said that was the right number, and told me the vine would do the rest.